Contributors
Shahzad Bashir
(Ph.D. 1998, Yale University) is Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities at Brown University. He specializes in the intellectual and social history of Iran and Central and South Asia. He is the author of Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (Columbia, 2011), Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis (Oneworld, 2005), and Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nūrbakhshīya Between Medieval and Modern Islam (South Carolina, 2003). His is currently finishing a book entitled Islamic Pasts and Futures: Conceptual Explorations that proposes new ways for making Islam an object of historical inquiry.
Devin DeWeese
(Ph.D. 1985, Indiana University) is a Professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) and (with Ashirbek Muminov) of Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: The Legacy of Ishaq Bab in Narrative and Genealogical Traditions, Vol. I: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th–19th Centuries (Almaty: Daik-Press, 2013). His other publications on the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and Iran focus chiefly on problems of Islamization, on the social and political roles of Sufi communities, and on Sufi literature and hagiography in Persian and Chaghatay Turkic.
Allen J. Frank
(Ph.D. 1994, Indiana University) is an independent scholar based in Takoma Park, Maryland. His specialization is in Turkic manuscript sources on the history of Muslims in the Volga-Ural region and Central Asia. His major works include Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia (Brill, 2001), Qurban-‘Ali Khalidi, An Islamic Biographical Dictionary of the Eastern Kazakh Steppe (co-editor), (Brill, 2005), Tatar Islamic Texts (Dunwoody Press, 2008), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: the Chinggisid Age (co-editor) (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia (Brill, 2012), and Sadwaqas Ghïlmani, Biographies of the Islamic Scholars of Our Times, (co-editor), (Daik Press, 2015). His current research involves Kazakh Sufi hagiographies of the Stalin era.
Jo-Ann Gross
(Ph.D. 1982, New York University) is Professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian History at The College of New Jersey. Her research focuses on the history of Sufism and shrine culture in Islamic Central Asia, and on Ismailism in Badakhshan. Her publications include The Letters of Khwāja ‘Ubayd Allāh Aḥrār and his Associates, co-authored with Asom Urunbaev (Brill, 2002) and Muslims in Central Asia: Expressions of Identity and Change (editor), (Duke University Press, 1992). Her current research is a collaborative project, funded by a 3-year National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, on the genealogical and documentary history of the Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs of Badakhshan in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, based on archival and field research she carried out between 2004–2016.
Kawahara Yayoi
(Ph.D. 2008, The University of Tokyo) is a research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. She specializes in the history of Central Asia, especially the khanate of Khoqand. She is a coeditor of Muḥammad Ḥakīm khān, Muntakhab al-tawārīkh, I–II (Tokyo, 2006–2009) and Documents from Private Archives in Right-Bank Badakhshan (Facsimiles and Introduction) (Tokyo, 2013–2015), and the author of Private Archives on a Makhdūmzāda Family in Marghilan (Tokyo, 2012) and “The Development of the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya in the Ferghana Valley during the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” Journal of the History of Sufism, 6 (Paris, 2015).
R. D. McChesney
(Ph.D. 1973, Princeton University), Emeritus Professor at New York University, is the author of Waqf in Central Asia (1991), Central Asia: Foundations of Change (1996), and Kabul Under Siege (1999), and editor and co-translator of the eleven-volume The History of Afghanistan: Fayż Muḥammad Kātib Hazārah’s Sirāj al-tawārīkh (Brill 2013–2016) He has also written many articles and book chapters on Afghan and Central Asian social history and is the founder and director of the Afghanistan Digital Library (https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu).
Ashirbek Muminov
(Ph.D. 1991, Institute of Oriental Studies, Saint Petersburg) is a Senior Researcher at the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA) in Istanbul. He has published monographs, catalogues and articles on Islam in Central Asia, including The Hanafi Madhhab in the History of Central Asia (Almaty, 2015, in Russian). He is currently preparing two books for publication: Saduaqas Ghїlmani. Biographies of the Islamic Scholars of Our Times (with Allen Frank and Aytzhan Nurmanova), and Epitaphs of the Muslim Scholars from Samarkand of the 4th–8th/10th–14th Centuries: Cultural and Social Contexts (with Bakhtiyar Babadjanov, Lola Dodkhudoeva and Ulrich Rudolph).
Maria Subtelny
(Ph.D. 1979, Harvard University) is Professor of Persian and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto, where she has been teaching courses on the history of medieval Iran and classical Persian literature since 1984. Her publications include Timurids in Transition: Turko-Persian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran (Brill, 2007); Le monde est un jardin: Aspects de l’histoire culturelle de l’Iran médiéval (Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2002); and the chapter on “Tamerlane and His Descendants: From Paladins to Patrons,” in vol. 3 of The New Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge, 2010). She is currently working on an edition and translation of the Akhlāq-i muḥsinī, a Persian treatise on political ethics by the Timurid-era author Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī.
Eren Tasar
(Ph.D. 2010, Harvard University) is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first book, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia, was published by Oxford University Press in December 2017. He has published articles and book chapters on aspects of Islam in Soviet Central Asia, and organized international conferences related to modern Central Asian history and Islamic Socialism.
Waleed Ziad
(Ph.D. 2017, Yale University) is Assistant Professor at Habib University in Karachi and was formerly an Islamic Law and Civilization Research Fellow at Yale Law School. He received his PhD with Distinction in History at Yale University, where his dissertation (Traversing the Indus and the Oxus: Trans-regional Islamic Revival in the Age of Political Fragmentation and the ‘Great Game’, 1747–1880, 797 pp.) was awarded the university-wide Theron Rockwell Field Prize. At the intersection of social history, religious studies, and anthropology, Ziad’s research concerns the historical and philosophical foundations of Muslim revivalism in the ‘Persianate’ world. He is also currently completing a monograph on a pilgrimage site centered on a cave temple in the Sakra range in the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier regions, which existed as a monetarily independent polity from the 4th–11th centuries. His articles on historical and ideological trends in the Muslim world have appeared in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Christian Science Monitor, and other international dailies.